Psych Out

“Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together in the same world, at peace.”
FDR 1945--his last speech, prepared but never delivered.

"Nowadays particularly, the world hangs on a thin thread....We are the great danger.  The psyche is the great danger.  What if something goes wrong with the psyche?  And so it is demonstrated to us in our days what the power of psyche is, how important it is to know something about it.  But we know nothing about it. Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man had any importance whatever."
C. G. Jung
interview in English, 1957

Professional psychology in its current form has taken some withering hits lately.  In July there was the report that revealed (in the words of the Washington Post story) "Leaders of the American Psychological Association secretly collaborated with officials at the Pentagon and CIA to weaken the association’s ethical guidelines and allow psychologists to take part in coercive interrogation programs after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a report released Friday."  

It was asserted years ago, and more recently proven, that several psychologists helped torturers during the Bush administration.   This report showed that such psychologists were highly influential in the organization.  But after this report was issued, the APA did not apologize, but defended what it did. Eventually it cleaned house and passed a binding resolution forbidding its members to do anything outside international law.

In August another study made news when a group of psychologists attempted to replicate 100 previously published psychological studies, and most of the time could not.  Their conclusions couldn't be proved, or they were overstated.

This is a kind of internal failure, within contemporary psychology's own assumptions and rules.  These failures were attributed in various technical ways as well as the inflation of results for gain and fame.  Some of the technicalities, other scientists claim, apply to all kinds of medical and other scientific research, so that most research findings are dubious.

But contemporary psychology's bullshit factor is so high for other reasons, many of which are identified by the eminent psychologist Jerome Kagan in his remarkable and predictably ignored 2012 book, Psychology's Ghosts.  Some of the established and therefore repeated mistakes are the failure to recognize and consider context (class, culture, situation) and the hidden biases that define healthy and unhealthy.

For example, Kagan writes: "Too many papers assume that a result found with forty white undergraduates at a Midwestern university responding to instructions appearing on a computer screen in a small, windowless room would be affirmed if participants were fifty-year-old South Africans administered the same procedure by a neighbor in a larger room in a familiar church in Capetown.”

This is not drollery: American university students of European background were the main subjects for more than 2/3 of the papers published in six leading journals between 2003 and 2007. There are usually a small number of participants, yet universal conclusions are offered.

In my review of this book, I add a corollary factor from my own experience: how the participants are chosen, and what that means.  I offer as an example the famous Yale Miligram experiments that purports to prove that people will obey authority figures to the point of causing painful shocks to others. Accidentally in New Haven at the time, I inquired about participating in what I'm pretty sure was one of those early experiments, but I ultimately refused.  Why I was interested, and why I refused suggests other factors that seem to cast questions on these conclusions, and to my mind invalidate them.

In these ways, psychology seems to invalidate itself as a science.  (Some believe that all of the so-called social sciences are pseudo-sciences.)  Psychology's attempt to measure behavior in order to predict it or modify it (often with drugs) is a failed and pernicious project.  It is based in part on trying to ape the methods of so-called hard sciences, depending on experiments and so-called controlled studies and deductions.  Why this doesn't work for anything as complex as human beings was eloquently explained, off-the-cuff, by the late great Jane Jacobs.  Basically, science can deal with just a few variables, and not with connections.  Science and psychology as they are predominantly practiced, deal with averages and quantities.

What contemporary psychology ignores is the psyche.  That just never comes up.  There's the brain and there's behavior.  The mechanism and the output.  It's either falsely mechanistic or falsely quantitative.

The psychology of Jung has been left behind and forgotten.  But it applies to individuals, not averages or quantities, not mechanisms.  In his own inductive science, through seeing patients and through introspection, Jung created conceptual tools that can help people examine and understand themselves enough to make their own changes in behavior.

Some of these tools I explored in the series on this site called The Climate Inside.  Concepts like the shadow, projection, denial, that individuals can use to examine their own psyches and behavior (with or without professional help), and come to their own conclusions. But today even more than in 1957, "no one gives credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man had any importance whatever."

Today's psychology is about treating humans as machines.  Most often as computers, "hard-wired" (often by Evolution) and fixable through tricks or drugs. Machines can only be altered from the outside.  But we are not hard-wired (there are no "wires" for a start), any more than our brains are telephone exchanges, or clocks, or our bodies are dynamos--all dominant metaphors of past ages.

Psyche is another word for soul.  Jung saw it as unfathomable, but we could learn something about it--not just from science but from untold centuries of stories and dreams, including the great cultural dreams called myth.  From the arts and humanities, and from minds that make the arrogant and often naive pronouncements of today's psychologists just so much simplistic nonsense.

There's a reason psychologists were so eager to sell out to government torturers--that's a very big client, and today's psychology is all about clients.  It's so obvious from the level of research that they are all about providing information on behavior and how to manipulate it for advertising, marketing and less subtle forms of persuasion and manipulation.  It's clearly a short walk to the best ways to inflict pain.  Today's psychology has no soul.  

Yet here we are, at a time when it is crucial for us to understand ourselves--without a psychology worthy of the name.